DAN Conference 2012

DAN Conference within the North American Jewish Day School Conference
Atlanta, GA
January 15 - 17, 2012

Monday

Session I: Anne Frank Confronts Queen Isabella: Learning with Technology and Play in Middle School
Dr. Jeff Stanzler - Faculty Member, University of Michigan School of Education

• Project: Jewish Court of All Time
• Students put on a costume to try to bring the wisdom of history to a present-day issue.

Key ideas:

• The self as a learner - thinking about the role and their own views
• Moving back and forth between the character and self, comparing and contrasting
• Identity, safety
• Thinking about our thinking - What leads me to this thinking?
• Voice in writing and expression
• JCAT: Jewish Court of All Time
• Simulation based on reality (a woman finds out that the US turned away a boat of desperate Jewish refugees during WWII)
• Character play in a genuine setup
• Wisdom of history
• Research and writing, make a series of decisions
• Evaluating historical evidence with primary source documents
• Opening up the classroom - public discussion sparked by questions, a call for experience
• Characters’ resumes are posted

Questions for research:

• Historical context
• Evidence of speech
• Setting up a case: for example - Should we amend the Constitution to define equal rights as not discriminating based on sexual orientation?
• Slow down and look at what is in the primary source - What stands out?
• Raising questions about the document
• What is the author trying to say?

Session II: Project-based learning in Jewish Montessori schools

• Students use touch-based materials to explore topics they are interested in, or topics that arise organically
• Example: a student with a broken arm prompted a study on broken versus healthy bones, and broken things altogether

Tuesday

Roundtable Discussions: Change and Resiliency - Rivka Ben Daniel

• Anecdote about why some teachers can't take the stress of teaching, and why some can't
• 50% of teachers drop out of the profession within the first five years of teaching
• 10 - 15% of DeLeT teachers drop out of the profession within the first five years
• Text study: Moses tells Joshua: Be strong and of good courage; Only be strong and very courageous; Be strong and of good courage, don't be afraid, neither be dismayed
• Case study: A parent approaches a new teacher and tells them that they have big shoes to fill and they will be keeping their eyes on the teacher. The teacher chose to remind herself of all the reasons she went into teaching, and ignored the negative comment
• Reasons for teacher burnout:
  • Poor student-teacher relationships - lack of respect for teachers, behavior problems
  • Role conflict - teaching philosophies differ between teacher and administration
  • Lack of control and decision making - no direction from administration
  • Time pressure - inadequate time for prep, unrealistic demands
  • Poor working conditions - big class sizes, inadequate resources
  • Poor colleague relationships - lack of trust and cooperation, competitiveness
  • Personal inadequacy - feeling poorly trained, teaching outside of competence, inadequate praise or recognition
  • Extra stressors - personal lives, negative community attitudes
• Ways to help reinvigorate yourself: find new ways to take initiative in the school; take on new projects
• Resiliency Wheel for administration: Provide caring and support; set and communicate high expectations; provide opportunities for meaningful participation; increase prosocial bonding (teacher collaboration, socializing, establishing a buddy in the school); set clear, consistent boundaries; teach "life skills" (organizational skills, time management, destressing, good diet choices)

Panel Discussion: Teacher Leadership

• Text study: Yitro comes up with a judicial system where some concerns come to Moshe, and others go to appointed officials (rabbinic biblical text that relates to this topic)
• Leaders should involve others in making decisions (whether they need it or not)
• Teacher-leaders: specialists, mentors, peer evaluators, curricula specialists and developers
• Teacher leaders: video your own practice, reflect and work on becoming a student of teaching as text
• Leadership capacities: different from teaching skills - willingness to push themselves beyond the classroom (a push from the outside?), initiates change in the classroom and the school, looks critically at the effectiveness of the school and determine needed changes, willing to put in time and effort to collaborate with what's going on outside of their own classroom
• Opportunities for teacher leadership in schools: search teams for new curricula, training for new curricula,
• Opportunities for initiating new programs in schools: creating a professional learning community in a school
• Built in to the culture of the school - training on building units
• Tension between opportunities beyond the classroom and teachers feeling like they are working beyond their paygrade
• Reflecting on teaching, looking for improvement, logging your reflection, making teaching practice public
• Teacher leadership standards - a list of skills needed for teacher leaders
• Every teacher is responsible for every child, move beyond caring only about "your" students
• Trying to change a culture is difficult - you should get people who will buy into the culture, and a board who will stand behind the head of school
• Curriculum 21 - book
• Shared information, the right tools, foundation support
• 21st Century skills - non-teacher coaches
• 3 learnings, 2 questions, 1 thing you are committing to do differently
• Learnings:
  • the first step is to reflect on your own teaching practice! You need the skills first.
  • It can be uncomfortable to bring a new idea to your supervisor
  • Take initiative! Think of new ideas
• Questions:
  • How can I get involved in teacher training? I want to teach about Understanding by Design
  • How can I determine if a potential school has an open attitude toward new ideas and autonomy versus standards
• Commitments:
  • Teach my colleagues about UbD

Roundtable Discussions #2: Reward Systems: Bribery or Motivation?

• Why do we use reward systems?
  • Classroom management
  • Community building
  • Personal behaviors
• Anecdote about reward systems: Earn a pizza party through points, extra recess for good behavior, etc. When the system was introduced, the students were excited, and the teacher diligently handed out tokens and marbles, etc. After 2 weeks, the teacher gave out less marbles and student misbehavior emerged. Students stated that they didn't even care about the prizes. It felt like the real learning was put aside in place of classroom management.
• Rethinking reward systems: what happens when you get rid of reward systems?
  • Does your reward system actually result in changed behaviors?
  • Do the students change their behavior all the time, or just when reminded about the reward?
  • Students like and want attention, and can sometimes exhibit negative attention.
  • Rewards promote competition, rather than collaboration
  • Punished by Rewards by Alfie Kohn
  • Rewards do not aide in internal motivation
  • Reward systems are temporary, and can result in poorer quality work (according to one study)
• Reward systems (if any) should be directly related to the skill
• Can recognition be reward enough?
• The learning or behavior should be the reward - show how learning this skill can lead to possibilities such as working together
• Behavior plans: kids get some reward at home, but they are able to reflect on their own behavior. Alternative: reflect on the student's behavior with them until it's not needed anymore
• Recognition as a model for self reflection - students can learn to look to themselves for approval

Keynote presentation and workshop: The Innovation Imperative by David Bryfman
Director, New Center for Collaborative Leadership at The Jewish Education Project

• We have no choice but to innovate and be creative, and change the way we do things
• Innovation Imperative (formerly "Innovate or Die")
• Whereas Skyping a bris was big news years ago, children are growing up with this reality these days
• Teenagers are a good indicator of what's happening in society
• There is a massive transformation taking place in the Jewish world today... We're going to look back and say that it's as important as other revolutions
• Who is in charge? Not rabbis, but Google and Wikipedia
• When you google a Jewish question, it sends you to 1. chabad, 2. aish, and 3. myjewishlearning (for death rituals and hummus recipes)
• Educators don't automatically have students' respect, they earn it
• Wikipedia (the accumulated information of the masses) is often more accurate that one expert (Brittainica)
• Students are taught to be critical in comparing texts, and taught that all texts are equal
• general trends in society will influence what we do in our classrooms

The changes that are taking place in society today are not about technology, but are expedited and vesseled through technology

• My playlist: children will choose what they participate in, things that hold value in the totality of who they are
• It's a small, globalized world - being exposed to such a globalized world gives kids the sense that being jewish is not important for the strength of the jewish people, but for bettering the world (disproportionate number of jews in social justice
• The guilt issue is no longer a motivating force in getting people involved in Jewish community. There are students who don't experience anti-Semitism, don't think Israel is under an existential threat
• Who am I? and Where do I fit in in this world?
  • You want to hang out with people who are like you and who are different
  • Young people may be narcissistic and self-centered, but they also want to spend time with others
• Jews use ethnical identifiers as defining what it means to be Jewish

What are our young people telling us?

• Parents are often reflecting the patterns of young people, rather than the other way around
• Right-wing conservative kids and Modern Orthodox kids have something in common: they only have Jewish friends, both in real life and on facebook
• younger kids (pre bar/bat mitzvah) mimic the patterns of their family (more likely the mother in mixed households)
• after bar/bat mitzvah, kids tend to mimic the patterns of their peers
• Dayschool kids are taught that there is a corpus of knowledge in order to be a well-informed Jew
• Jewish camp kids are taught that there is a corpus of Jewish experience they need in order to be a connected Jew
• 70-75% of Jews today have a bar/bat mitzvah (largest growing type occurs outside of the congregation)
• 7-10% of Jewish youth in high school are involved in organized Jewish life

How might I change?

• Involving Jewish culture in the classroom
• Expanding views on what is a text?
• Hanoch - means rededication (such as Hanukah)
• Our job as Jewish educators is to inspire young people along their journeys to want to bring Jewish texts into their learning
• Black and white answers are not the response to complex issues such as Israel

How might my institution change?

• Schools do not confront these questions, but rather seek to keep on the same path
• Schools are not adapting fast enough (versus schools are always on this trajectory)

In order to innovate:

• recognize a problem
• believe change is possible
• creativity is everyone's domain
• get over mental fixedness (we can't get over mental images of what should be)
• brainstorming (especially amongst the same people) can only yield so much
• creativity is related to innovation, but not the same thing
  • creativity is coming up with a new idea
  • innovation is implementing a creative idea in a systematic way to a problem with measurable outcomes
  • adaptive innovation means taking others' ideas and tweaking them
  • transformative innovation means taking on a whole new idea
• The modified SIT (Systematic Inventive Thinking) method
  • what are your closed world resources? Whiteboard, desks, library, texts, document camera, laptops, pencils, students, teachers, administrators, assistants, mentors, parents, supplies, professional development, curricula, projects, special events, location (D.C.)
  • subtract the most important resource and imagine a school without it.
• A school without a budget: everyone comes with their own resources, more communication with parents on projects, asking more for parent involvement and collaboration, more recycling and resourcefulness, natural objects as math manipulatives, volunteer teachers (different teacher everyday), different teacher style, collaboration, breaking down teaching into skills, different days for different skills, online resources, public library resources
• What would a school look like without teachers?

Laura Lauder discussing the future of DAN
Ideas: creating a curriculum bank by using betterlesson.org with a special delet tag
What obstacles were there to coming to the NAJDS conference?
What do we think about holding the DeLeT conference within the larger NAJDS conference?

• Day chair: paid compensation for putting on a regional one-day conference?
• Obstacles: too many people from JCDS-Boston wanted to come (!)
• Day conferences on Sundays 9-4 to allow for others to attend
• Putting lesson plans that are not refined or ready would be too nerve-wracking for teachers (Samara)
• Holding the conference in the NAJDS conference was great PR and eliminated a lot of logistical tasks (Jamie)
• Professional development topics within the larger conference context have already been covered in the DeLeT program, the DAN specific programming was better at extending learning
• Curriculum mapping (program called Atlas) maps out curriculum to standards and to other grades
• Logistical obstacles in coming: had to find 2 instructional aides to cover and no funding (Anna)
• Curriculum database - challenge in finding a platform, making it easy to search and access, encouraging people to share their work (whether refined or not)
• Why are some DeLeT fellows NOT involved?
• Opportunity to plan the larger NAJDS conference? Thanks to Jane West Walsh for bringing in DeLeT

Tuesday

Mini-keynote: 21st Century Learning with Michael Mino
Kahn Academy
Moodle.com - a site for course management
Every school needs to have a comprehensive learning environment online
Cloud environment - Amazon
GoogleApps for Education:

• Under your domain
• free for primary education
• hosts videos, websites, etc
• 75% of the schools at NAJDS conference are using GoogleApps
• 4th grade has everything online

Mobile learning/mobile devices

• iPhone "passback" effect - kids as young as 1 are able to figure out technology with little to no direction
• Wild West for apps - no gate keepers
• the implications for the mobile app environment will hit us in a few years when kids who are learning from mobile apps enter kindergarten

Virtual environment:

• Second Life - a place where students can explore and build

Physical environment:

• Connected all the time
• Hardwire for larger bandwidth
• The environment is the third teacher (Regio philosophy)

Why does a 21st Century environment improve education:

• improves feedback system (kids get faster responses from teacher)
• more engaging

Examples from a Jewish day school:

• creating a story from screen shots, animation, and voice threads on the iPad
• Art gallery uses QR codes to play a clip of the artist describing the artwork
• Using Ning as a closed social network

Intensive Workshop: Organizing Schools for Teacher Learning with Sharon Feiman-Nemser and Vivien Troen

• The needs of beginning teachers highlights the needs of all teachers
• Learning for teachers is as important for the quality of education as learning for students
• Excellent teaching needs conditions for supportive learning for teachers
• Any new reform in schools requires serious teacher learning - learning the ideas, content, concepts, skills
• We need to make the practice of teaching a public practice
• Years of experience teaching does not automatically equal expertise

Framing questions:

1. What are some of the enabling conditions in school that foster ongoing teacher development?
2. What structural changes do schools have to make?
3. What new capacities need to be developed and by whom?

Case study at Frankel Jewish Academy

• Transformation of culture - sparked by? The first step was partnering with Mandel Center
• Every school needs someone who is looking in from the outside to help you become a better place
• Created opportunities for mentor study groups, Mentor/mentee sessions, Leadership meetings
• Structured change: means letting go of people, of ideas
• 2 years to change a culture - involved letting people and ideas go
• External coach
• take videos of everything
• commit themselves in a new way
• work with others
• raising the bar, demanding more of everyone, even teachers who have been there a long time
• hire new teachers who are committed to the culture (buy in)
• everybody gets a mentor, even experienced teachers
• teacher-centered conferences: supervisor, mentor, and mentee
• Mediocrity meant failure. The only way to succeed was by being excellent.
• $60,000 annually to spend on professional development for a school of 220 students
• Turnover: 35 staff members in 3 years, very painful in a profession that is supposed to be nurturing
• Teachers who are closed to the idea of collaboration are an obstacle to the culture of the school
• Content of conversations in staff room: getting teachers to collaborate about their work rather than gossip
• A school exists for the sake of the kids. Once that is in focus, you can move forward with the right actions.
• How to identify mentors? Who do you have on staff?

How does a teacher know if the culture of the school is right for them?

• do you observe your teachers? how often?
• are there built in times for meetings for teachers to collaborate?
• tell me about your school's resources and how they are distributed
• does your school have an online community?
• is there a mentor program in your school?
• tell me about support for new teachers and new staff